John Wagster
Senior Software Engineer at Elastic
Franklin, Tennessee, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Wagster is a Senior Software Engineer and architect focused on vector search, NLP, and intelligent systems, currently advancing vector databases and Lucene at Elastic. With a background spanning research scientist to VP of Engineering, he blends hands-on algorithmic work (CRFs, neural nets, deep learning) with product-minded architecture and team leadership. He has shipped core contributions to Elasticsearch—improving multi-value sparse vectors and script-score explanations—bringing open-source impact to production search systems. Comfortable in Java, Scala, Python and system administration, he repeatedly bridges data science, security, and scalable deployment for enterprise-grade analytics. Notably, his career balances deep probabilistic modeling expertise with practical productization experience gained across long tenures at Digital Reasoning and leadership roles building cross-functional engineering teams.
2 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Case Western Reserve UniversityMS Computer Science, MS Computer Science at Vanderbilt University
Github Skills (15)
lucene10
javas10
elasticsearch10
search-engine10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
java10
elasticsearch-api10
amazon-elasticsearch10
algorithms8
data-structures8
algorithm8
data-structure8
apidoc7
api7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/elasticsearch
May 2024 - Apr 2025
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:110 reviews, 57 PRs, 17 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the core functionalities of the Elasticsearch search engine. Their work involved implementing support for multi-value sparse vectors, enhancing the explanation functionality for script score queries and improving the user dictionary feature. The changes included code modifications to improve data handling and the parsing of user provided dictionary entries.
restfulsearch-engineopensearchelasticsearchjava
john-wagster/lucene
Jun 2024 - Apr 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Contributions:1 review, 7 PRs, 61 pushes in 9 months
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